How Kamala’s Campaign is Rewriting the Rules—and Making Trump Melt Down

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome new readers, welcome back old friends, and many thanks to all for reading, commenting, and thinking along with me. Today we’re going to discuss…

The Genius of Kamala’s Campaign

Go ahead, admit it. You’ve been delighted, thrilled, and amazed at Kamala’s and Tim Walz’s campaign. It’s different.

We’re seeing a kind of revolution happen before us. This is the first truly modern campaign—not just political, but period—of its kind.

Look at the Press Release above. Now think of what political communications are supposed to be. Boring. Staid. Stale. Tiptoeing around the issues. Never saying the crucial part out loud. Who are they really written for? They speak diplomatic language, because they’re written for institutions, not people. Journalists, maybe, governments, bureaucrats.

But this, like I said, couldn’t be more different. 

These “press releases” aren’t anything like that. They’re meant for you and me to read. To pore over. To cackle at. To share. On social media. They’re designed to go viral. And along with that, they’re meant for one very, very important target. 

Donald Trump. The more that these seep into popular consciousness, the more we all talk about them, the more and more Trump has a meltdown. Because these are designed to goad him. To provoke him. To cause him narcissistic injury. To poke a sharp needle of mockery right in between his puffed up feather of egomania and infantile narcissism.

And all that’s working. Trump’s having public meltdown after meltdown. Why does that matter?

He’s not on the offensive anymore. He’s on the defensive.

That’s so crucial that you should take a moment to take it all in. 

This is Genius Level Stuff, my friends. It’s put Trump on the defensive, which is something that nobody’s done in his life. And yet we’ve only just begun.

How to Take On the (Failing) Media and Win

What else is Kamala’s campaign doing differently? It’s sidestepping the media. And that’s infuriating pundits and access journalists and columnists, who aren’t used to being…ignored. They’re angrily demanding interviews, sit-downs, pressers. And there’s Kamala’s team, coolly…

They just rolled out an interview. Of their own. Kamala interviews Tim, and Tim interviews Kamala. It’s sweet, poignant, beautiful, funny, and above all, authentic, resonant, and true. It went mega, mega viral. Why? Because it’s real. Because it matters.

These are the people who are going to lead the most powerful country on earth. 

Think now of the particular genius at work here. The media offer—demands—interviews. But we all know what’d happen next. They’d ask gotcha questions. They’d snipe. They’d ignore substance and facts. They’d try to make it some kind of spectator sport. 

So, in this astonishing innovation—and these are all innovations, make no mistake—the Kamala team came up with this idea of flipping the script. What’s really happening when Kamala interviews Tim, and Tim interviews Kamala? Many things. The message that we don’t need the media, especially if they’re going to abuse their power, is sent. Meanwhile, a story is told, that’s meaningful and powerful. And alongside that, people begin to see these two leaders for the people they are, the relationship they have in full, open view, for everyone to see.

That’s incredibly powerful. It’s this kind of approach that makes the media feel small, irrelevant, biased, narrow-minded. What could they have to say more and better than Kamala and Tim say to each other? And if that’s true…what’s the media there for, exactly? Just to snipe? Soon, we’ll come to Trump, but I want you to begin here, and understand how stories can be told in better ways than having gatekeepers tell them for you.

Cultural Innovation and Building Movements

So. I said all these are innovations, and they are. Imagine, for example, if your average Boring Corporation began to write press releases…like that. Like Kamala’s team does. Bang. The internet would blow up. Because they don’t. They’re not designed to be read by people—because they’re made of spin and hype. 

Now think of the language in those press releases. It’s not your average boring stuff, is it? It’s meant to be read by people, and so it’s written not in formal technical jargon, but in plain English. And it goes for the jugular. That resonates with people, because all this has become a circus of bullshit, to be quite frank with you—PR, marketing, communications, especially when it comes to politics.

Genuine innovation is happening here, and it’s sort of amazing to behold.

So let’s try and sum all that up a little bit. Kamala’s team has an approach that’s something close to revolutionary. It goes like this. “Disintermediate” the media, as in, take them out of the equation, remove their mediation. Be your own media, and draft all this stuff, from press releases to interviews, yourself, for people to engage with. Put it all out there, and along the way, goad Trump into narcissistic meltdowns, so everyone can see who he really is, at last.

Let me say that part again, too, because it matters intensely.

All this provokes Trump into revealing who he really is. And as he does that, people shake their heads, and walk away. See the genius level at work here?

Why Trump is Outmatched—and Sinking

Is it any wonder Trump seems outmatched here? 

That’s because he is. Trump’s very, very good at one thing: manipulating the media. He’s an expert at it. He says he’ll offer an interview, and suddenly, it turns into a speech, or he dangles access at various journalists, or he offers newspapers clicks and drama and spectacle, and they fall for it.

This is all well and good, until you meet a campaign that works at a higher level. If you’re good at manipulating mass media, but suddenly, there’s a campaign that’s discovered how to sidestep it, and generate momentum and moments all on its own—then, suddenly, your particular talent has been checkmated.

Trump is floundering for a reason, in other words. He’s outmatched. He doesn’t know what to do with all this. His skill of media manipulation has been rendered increasingly irrelevant. Meanwhile, he can’t stand people talking about him, without him being at the center, making fun of him, laughing at him, and so he’s goaded into meltdowns, and like I said, everyone can see who he really is—just a sad, desperate, scared, feeble, crazy guy.

And that cycle keeps spinning. The more Kamala’s comms team goads him, the more he falls for it, the more he shows everyone who he really is…rinse and repeat. That’s why his ratings are plummeting, and his campaign is in shambles, to the point that he just fired his staff. They don’t know what to do about this, because they’ve met a campaign better than theirs.

It’s a thing of beauty to see.

This is the First Truly Modern Campaign of Any Kind

All of this is—if you ask me—kind of revolutionary. Think about marketing works right now. Some people say that Kamala’s team is just doing what’s trendy, but in fact, it goes way, way deeper than that. If you asked even a cutting edge ad agency to run a campaign for you, any kind, they’d recommend something like the following.

Influencers, to make things trendy. Press releases, targeted at mass media. Flashy logos and clever buzzwords. Glossy ads here and there.

Kamala’s campaign is so innovative that in fact it’s not really doing much of that at all, or at least, those things aren’t the central focus. It isn’t trying to win every influencer under the sun, even if celebs endorse her—they don’t make a huge deal of that. You don’t see glossy ads. The whole thing is different, revolutionary, and utterly innovative. 

Let’s now crystallize some of the components. The press releases are for you and me. Imagine if, I don’t know, any corporation you like did that. The interviews are between Tim and Kamala. Imagine if Tim Cook did that with Apple’s head of design. The language is plain and goes for the jugular—so much so that it makes a slogan even as vaunted as Nike’s “just do it” feel old. There’s no need to appease mass media—the central idea is to go around it, until it sort of comes back to its senses. On and on it goes.

This is dramatic and spectacular stuff. It’s so innovative. I don’t say that lightly. I helped teach the Big Five marketing groups how to think about brands and communications, and if you ask me, this is the first truly modern campaign of any kind. It is that good. And more to the point, it’s that effective. It’s moving the needle in incredibly dramatic ways, causing huge swings in approval, people roaring with enthusiasm, delight, approval.

Not because some influencer made them, but because they feel like they’re part of this. This…new thing. What’s really going on here? Kamala and Tim’s campaign is about building a movement, and to do that, people have to feel directly connected to its leaders, which is what all these strategies are about. They’re working brilliantly, and we can see that reflected in the skyrocketing numbers. Nobody’s ever tried this combination of stuff before—been brave, wise, and smart enough to. Not a corporation, not a celeb, nobody. This is the first of its kind.

It is rewriting the rules of communications as we know and practice them, and that’s an amazing thing to behold.

I think that every ad agency in the world should be studying it intently. It is leapfrogging past what they consider cutting edge, taking quantum leaps, in fact. If I was still the Chief Brain of a massive communications group? I’d make everyone do nothing for a week but just understand all the innovations at work in this campaign.

For the rest of us, though, perhaps it’s worth taking a second to think about why all this feels so..different. That’s because it is. It’s fresh, exciting, thrilling, and fun, for a reason. It’s mattering. It’s changing things. By changing how communications are done, what they are, why they happen at all. And in that sense of change, there’s a feeling of possibility. We can become part of this movement. We can begin to regain sanity, normalcy, hope. We can do this together.

It’s a special moment. Moments like this don’t happen often. Take a moment—my advice—to savor it all.

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